Last year, I asked a course participant to keep a diary of every task she worked on. She lasted 2.5 days until she gave up. She was too busy to even write things down, but the results were illuminating.

She spent 80% of her time welcoming every newcomer, searching for stock photos, creating content, helping members with technical issues, collecting and analyzing the latest analytical reports, hosting a hashtag discussion, sitting in internal meetings, responding to discussions in the community etc…

This is the most likely reason you might not be getting the results you want.

It’s impossible to get great results if you’re splitting your time across 30+ tasks.

This reflects a total lack of strategy. We worked with her to identify her goals, objectives, strategy, and tactics. Then we brutally chopped down the number of tactics she was executing from 30+ to 5. Just five.

You can’t afford to let yourself become bogged down in the minutia, you have to focus on tactics which can have the biggest impact.

Each of these tactics we selected for her had the potential to be super high-impact.

By recollection, the main three were:

1. Ensure experts had new, interesting, problems. Every time someone visited the community, she would make sure there were interesting problems to solve (if none came from members, she would source them from throughout the web or create hypotheticals). The purpose was to provoke curiosity and excitement from experts about visiting the community.

2. Create and use an ‘add this to the knowledge book’ button and encourage members to submit great advice to a wiki that would be easy to search and last forever. This would give something lurkers and low-active members to do, while giving experts something to take pride in and keep score of.

3. Find and share the best member advice in industry media. This meant creating the perception of the community throughout the industry as a place where people shared unique, new, advice.

Now instead of trying to do everything, she only worked on tactics that could have a big impact. And the results proved the point.

Participation from top experts almost doubled within 2.5 months, posts by regular members rose by 17% (averaged), and the number of first-time visitors rose by 43% (largely through two successful placements).

These are the kinds of successes you can gain relatively quickly if you can properly prioritise what matters and allocate your time.

How Strategic Are You Today?

I want you to really think about how you’re allocating your time today.

What happens if you stop doing most of the low-impact tasks today and only focus on the tactics which are strategy and have the potential to be a huge win?

The real benefit of this isn’t just the motivation it provides you or the possible results, but it lets you do each of these tactics extremely well.